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Progress in the Good: a Defense of the Thomistic Unity Thesis

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Progress in the Good: a Defense of the Thomistic Unity Thesis Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2014): 147-174 Progress in the Good: A Defense of the Thomistic Unity Thesis Andrew Kim HE UNITY THESIS refers to the view that a single virtue can- not be possessed in isolation from the other virtues.1 It is a thesis with a long and complex history. Socrates is already in a defensive posture when he first defends the thesis againstT the commonsense point of view espoused by Protagoras in the early dialogues.2 Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Augustine, and Aquinas all affirm versions of the thesis that, as Alasdair MacIntyre notes, “differ… from each other in a number of important ways.”3 Whatever historical interest it may have today, the unity thesis is al- most universally rejected by contemporary ethicists.4 Though cri- tiques of the unity thesis are manifold and cannot be summarized under one head, the common denominator of these critiques may be stated as follows: if the unity thesis is true, then no one is virtuous. This is because the unity thesis appears to totalize virtue attribu- 1My focus throughout is on the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, forti- tude. 2 Protagoras 359 b-c. See T. Penner, “The Unity of Virtue,” The Philosophical Re- view 82 (1973): 35-68; “What Laches and Nicias Miss—And Whether Socrates Thinks Courage is Merely a Part of Virtue,” Ancient Philosophy 12 (1992): 1-27; P. Woodruff, “Socrates on the Parts of Virtue,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Sup- plementary volume, 2 (1976): 101-16; T.H. Irwin, Plato’s Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 86-90; M. Ferejohn, “The Unity of Virtue and the Objects of Socratic Inquiry,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 20 (1982): 1-21; “The Unity of Virtue as the Parts of Itself,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Re- search 43 (1984): 83-95; D. Devereux, “Courage and Wisdom in Plato’s Laches,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 15 (1977): 141; “The Unity of the Virtues,” The Philosophical Review 102 (1993): 765-89. For an excellent summary of the secondary literature see Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, “Socrates and the Unity of the Virtues,” The Journal of Ethics 1 (1997): 312-15. 3 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 142. 4 See Jean Porter, “The Unity of the Virtues and the Ambiguity of Goodness: A Reappraisal of Aquinas’s Theory of the Virtues,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 21 (1993): 138-66; Also see Porter’s “Virtue and Sin: The Connection of the Virtues and the Case of the Flawed Saint,” Journal of Religion 75 (1995): 521-39. For an in depth treatment of rejections of the unity thesis in moral philosophy and psychology see Andrew Kim, “Thomas Aquinas on the Connection of the Virtues” (PhD diss., The Catholic University of America, 2013), 6-51. 148 Andrew Kim tions.5 To attribute courage to John entails attributing prudence, tem- perance, and justice to him as well. If he lacks one or all of these lat- ter virtues, then we must deny his courage as well. The purpose of the current essay is to show that the Thomistic version of the unity thesis is not susceptible to this charge most commonly brought against the unity thesis in general. In so doing, I show that the Tho- mistic account of virtue offers a framework for virtue attribution that avoids problems found in rival approaches. As shall become clear, critiques of the unity thesis prompt inquiry into the relationship be- tween the unity thesis and what constitutes a virtue. This essay unfolds over four sections. First, I argue that the Stoic definition of virtue leads to an untenable position with respect to vir- tue attribution due to the totalizing problem described above. This section includes an analysis of Augustine’s criticism of the Stoic view and charts a part of the development of that criticism in the thought of Aquinas’s medieval predecessors and in Aquinas’s own work. Based on my analysis of these criticisms, I respond to a com- mon misconception by showing that denial of the Stoic totalizing of virtue does not entail denial of the unity thesis. This is significant because to reject the unity thesis is to redefine virtues as mere skills direct-able to good or bad, which leads to internally inconsistent vir- tue attributions. The third section shows how Aquinas avoids the aforementioned problems by affirming both the unity thesis and that virtue in the conditions of this world is possessed by degrees in stag- es of time. The concluding section provides final summary of the findings of this essay as well as the limitations of these findings. THE STOICS The purpose of this section is to demonstrate that the Stoics’ defi- nition of virtue leads them to an untenable position with respect to virtue attribution. The early Stoics advanced a form of the unity the- sis that is bound up with their definition of virtue. However, Augus- tine, Aquinas’s scholastic predecessors, and Aquinas himself recog- nized that rejecting the Stoic totalizing of virtue did not entail reject- ing the unity thesis in toto, only the Stoic version of it. This is signif- icant since unqualified rejection of the unity thesis leads to accounts of virtue that are problematic for reasons made apparent in the next section. 5 By “virtue attributions” I mean claims that a given individual possesses a discrete virtue. Critics of the unity thesis regard it as “totalizing” virtue attributions since, if it is true that to possess one virtue is to possess them all, then any attribution of a discrete virtue entails an attribution of every virtue. Progress in the Good 149 The problem of ‘capped off’ virtue The definition of virtue espoused by the early Stoics renders vir- tue attribution impossible, because it entails that a person is not vir- tuous to any degree until he has reached the summit of his moral po- tential.6 The moral austerity of the Stoics is expressed in a salient metaphor: For just as those who are submerged in the ocean cannot breathe, whether they are so close to the surface that they are just about to emerge or they are down deep…so too whoever is making little pro- gress toward the habit of virtue is no less in misery than one who has not progressed at all.7 As Laertius understands it, the point of this metaphor is to deny the reality of moral progress. Though the passage distinguishes between those “making little progress” and those who have “not progressed at all,” the point is that these groups are, in any important sense, in the same position. Drowning is drowning. Another analogy the Stoics employed was that of “a puppy which is just about to open its eyes.” The Stoics argued that “a puppy which is just about to open its eyes is no less blind than one which has just been born. Either it sees or it does not. Either one can breathe or one cannot; either one is guilty or one is not.”8 Again, there is no signifi- cant difference between the sight of the newborn puppy and the one “about to open its eyes.” It either can see or it cannot. J.M. Rist has analyzed the import of Stoic analogies regarding their view of the moral life: A piece of wood is either straight or it is not; there are no degrees of straightness any more than degrees of justice. The wise man differs from everybody else not in degree but in kind. Just as a proposition is either true or not-true, so men are either moral or not moral. One 6 Diogenes Laertius (ca. 250 A.D.) understands the Stoics to reject the Peripatetic claim that there exists a middle position wherein one is progressing towards virtue without yet possessing it: “while the Peripatetics say that progress lies between vir- tue and vice,” the Stoics “believed there is nothing between virtue and vice.” Vitae 7.127, trans. Inwood and Gerson 144; cited in R.E. Houser, The Cardinal Virtues: Aquinas, Albert, and Philip the Chancellor (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediae- val Studies, 2004), 17. 7 Cicero, De finibus 3.14.48. Augustine references this in Letter 167 to Jerome ex- amined below. 8 Cicero, De Finibus 3.48 (Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, ed. J. Von Arnim (Leip- zig: Teubner, 1903-1924), III 530), 4.75 (Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, III 531); Plut., CN 1063A (Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, III 539). Cited in J.M. Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 83. 150 Andrew Kim thing cannot be “more” true or “more” false than another; and moral- ity is similar.9 The early Stoics were unwilling to concede to the commonsense point of view that some wood is less bent than other wood and some men are less moral than others and so forth. According to Rist, this is because the Stoics were “afraid” of polluting the very concept of moral goodness: If the concept of moral goodness admits of degrees, who can say that it could reach a term? If Smith is better than Jones, who is better than Thomas, how can any man be said to be perfect. Could not some moral improvement be imagined? In other words, how could there be a sage or wise man? The Stoics in fact reject a form of the ontological argument in advance. For them, if there are degrees of moral goodness, there cannot be a good, only a relative good.10 Thus, in defining virtue as an absolute state not subject to gradation the Stoics eliminate the possibility of degrees of moral progress.
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